temptest

It's alright, and just to be clear, I do use and support F-Droid because I personally think it is better and suits my privacy goals. I didn't mean to sound as if I wasn't supporting it, just that it's a bit more nuanced when talking about the security side: like almost everything in security, it's more complex than one took being universally better than another.

I did make up my mind, and both I and the article both explicitly emphasise people to apply the facts it presents to their own circumstances. What you just wrote is very condescending and insulting.

I haven't checked it out in about 5 years, but PeerTube instances could be worth checking out.

It's actually surprising no-one else said it, since it's open source and federated (just like Lemmy is)

OpenVoiceOS (OVOS) or NeonAI software (both continuations of the former Mycroft voice assistant) could be useful tools for doing a lot of the Voice Assistant tasks if you want more than just playing music. I'm not an expert on this but if you don't get another response then those are the projects I would dig into.

https://openvoiceos.org/

The Downloads section even lists the RaspPi and microphones they officially support, and their community could give guides on how to make one.

I can't find anything about this. Got a source?

This is a bit of a fallacious point in this context - it suggests:

• apps will be investigated by its users (not guaranteed, nor even likely for unpopular apps)
• an app will even have users capable of detecting malware (I don't know squat about phone malware patterns, so I wouldn't be effective at it even if I did scan through thousands of lines of code)

What is your justification for this claim?

I use F-Droid as my main app store, and while I trust most of the apps on there and haven't found any asking for permissions they don't need, I wouldn't claim any Android app store is more secure than the Play Store. This post goes into technical detail comparing the two: https://privsec.dev/posts/android/f-droid-security-issues/ - Note: emphasis in the conclusion mentioning that these criticisms may or may not really matter, depending on your threat model. (as an aside - if anyone here doesn't know what a threat model is, determine yours before participating in any privacy community or you'll just end up with useless paranoia)

That said, I would guess that Play Store may have a higher risk of malicious apps only due to the fact that there are far, far, far, far more potential victims, and being the default app store, victims less likely to be technically experienced enough to notice false apps. So, almost all attackers will probably aim for the most targets and only bother targeting the Play Store, despite the extra challenges.

[tagging @elbowgrease@lemm.ee ]

A lot of the utility is it having apps with similar capabilities but without the same kind of privacy invasions, and with better description of what anti-features an app has. So as far as 'the average user', I'd just say alternative apps (or even the same ones, if you're already using FOSS apps) to the same ones they'd use on Play Store, and a few of the games.

I don't know how much bloat Mint adds

Not enough to make me think about it, it's not like I'm running a server or fighting for storage space. But if the thought of Flatpaks is enough to frighten, then it could be a problem.

Maybe so. For me it was that even Sid was too outdated for me (e.g. with native Linux games and some software development), and to try and Frankenstein it into what I wanted was effort and instability I didn't want, especially when some Ubuntu-derivatives were much better suited for my personal-use situation.

Is ChromeOS a distro? (obvious reasons)

I can't really think of another one I don't like. I had a bad time on Debian but that is because my use case conflicted with it, not because it's bad.

How is anyone supposed to have an unbiased opinion?

What features of Manjaro would make it something you prefer? A different DE? Mint offers more than just one.